Hoda Afshar at musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac
The acclaimed Iranian-Australian artist’s first solo exhibition in France opens this September
 |
| Hoda Afshar (b. 1983), Speak the wind, 2015-2020. Inkjet photographic prints. Courtesy of the artist, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia and Art Africa. |
This autumn, the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac presents ‘Hoda Afshar: Performing the Invisible’, the first exhibition in France dedicated to the Iranian-born, Melbourne-based artist. Running from 30 September 2025 to 25 January 2026, the show brings together two recent significant bodies of work—Speak the wind (2015–2020) and The Fold (2023–2025)—each reflecting Afshar’s deep engagement with the politics of visibility, history, and photographic representation.
Curated by Annabelle Lacour, Curator of the Photographic Collection at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, the exhibition spans photography, video, sound, and installation. It is presented in close collaboration with the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
Hoda Afshar has become a leading figure in Australian contemporary art, known for blending conceptual, staged, and documentary approaches. Her work challenges the traditional role of photography as a neutral recorder of reality, interrogating its historical entanglement with systems of power and control. Drawing from her own experiences of migration and cultural displacement, Afshar unpacks the tensions between truth, representation, and agency.
The first part of the exhibition, Speak the wind, is rooted in the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, where local beliefs hold that winds can possess individuals and cause illness or misfortune. Believed to have travelled to Iran via the Arab slave trade from southeast Africa, these spiritual beliefs carry a largely unspoken colonial history. Afshar’s haunting images and accompanying video resist the traditional documentary gaze, instead offering a poetic visual meditation shaped by community, myth, and memory.
The second work, The Fold, is the result of the artist’s in-depth research into the museum’s photographic archives—specifically, an early 20th-century collection of images taken in Morocco by French military doctor Gaëtan de Clérambault. Afshar responds to this archive with a multi-part installation composed of silver gelatin prints, printed mirrors, video, and sound, interrogating how photography functioned as a colonial tool in shaping Western perceptions of North Africa. Through aesthetic intervention and critical reinterpretation, The Fold challenges not only the historical motivations of the original photographer but also the ongoing influence of colonial imagery on cultural memory.
Together, these two works reveal Afshar’s continued interest in making the invisible visible—whether by surfacing obscured cultural histories or exposing the structures behind visual representation itself.
Born in Tehran in 1983, Hoda Afshar currently lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne). Her work has been widely exhibited across Australia and internationally, including at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Paris Photo, and the Venice Biennale. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Prix Pictet, and her photographs are held in significant public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Getty Museum (USA), the Kadist Collection (Paris), and the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation (Germany).
‘Hoda Afshar: Performing the Invisible’ runs from 30 September 2025 to 25 January 2026. For more information, visit quaibranly.fr/en
Via Art Africa
No comments:
Post a Comment